Lucas disagreed as politely as if exchanging pleasantries in a salon.

“A dexterous game, M. le Comte.  Your best friends deemed you guilty.  What would your enemies have said?”

“Ah-h,” breathed M. Etienne.

“It dawns on you, monsieur?  You are marvellous thick-witted, yet surely you must perceive.  We had a dozen fellows ready to swear that your hand killed Monsieur.”

“You would kill me for my father’s murder?”

“Ma foi, no!” cried Lucas, airily.  “Never in the world!  We should have let you live, in the knowledge that whenever you displeased us we could send you to the gallows.”

M. le Comte, silent, stared at him with wild eyes, like one who looks into the open roof of hell.  Lucas fell to laughing.

“What! hang you and let our cousin Valere succeed?  Mon dieu, no!  M. de Valere is a man!”

With a blow the guardsman struck the words and the laughter from his lips.  But I, who no more than Lucas knew how to hold my tongue, thought I saw a better way to punish this brazen knave.  I cried out: 

“You are the dupe, Lucas!  Aye, and coward to boot, fleeing here from—­nothing.  I knew naught against you—­you saw that.  To slip out and warn Martin before Vigo got a chance at him—­that was all you had to do.  Yet you never thought of that but rushed away here, leaving Martin to betray you.  Had you stuck to your post you had been now on the road to St. Denis, instead of the road to the Greve!  Fool! fool! fool!”

He winced.  He had not been ashamed to betray his benefactor, to bite the hand that fed him, to desert a wounded comrade; but he was ashamed to confront his own blunder.  I had the satisfaction of pricking, not his conscience, for he had none, but his pride.

“I had to warn Grammont off,” he retorted.  “Could I believe St. Quentin such a lack-wit as to forgive these two because they were his kin?  You did better than you knew when you shut the door on me.  You tracked me, you marplot, you sneak!  How came you into the coil?”

“By God’s grace,” M. le Comte answered.  He laid a hand on my shoulder and leaned there heavily.  Lucas grinned.

“Ah, waxing pious, is he?  The prodigal prepares to return.”

M. Etienne’s hand clinched on my shoulder.  Vigo commanded a gag for Lucas, saying, with the only touch of anger I ever knew him to show: 

“He shall hang when the king comes in.  And now to horse, lads, and out of the quarter; we have wasted too much time palavering.  King Henry is not in Paris yet.  We shall do well not to rouse Belin, though we can make him trouble if he troubles us.  Come, monsieur.  Men, guard your prisoner.  I misjudge if he is not cropful of the devil still.”

He did not look it.  His figure was drooping; his face purple and contorted, for one of the troopers had crammed his scarf into the man’s mouth, half strangling him.  As he was led past us, with a sudden frantic effort, fit to dislocate his jaw, he disgorged the gag to cry out wildly: